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"When they allow a talk show host to play them like a two-dollar banjo, they demonstrate what kind of backbone they'll bring to the job later on, if we elect them. After they get elected will they continue to allow Jeff Crank to put a nickel in them and wind them up every Saturday morning?"

Barry Noreen, former columnist, Colorado Springs Gazette

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

CUTTING TO THE QUICK Part I.

By

ROBERT HARKINS

President Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and one time editor of its Law Review, is also our first presidential constitutional scholar. Indeed, he taught the Constitution to Harvard law students: passionate young men and women no doubt yearning to labor selflessly in the vineyards of justice which at Harvard is known as Wall Street. Now Barack Obama the youth has become a man and lately, tragically, president of the United States.

The president also taught a Marxist oriented critical race theory. He required that his students read the works of the late Derrick Bell, a friend, a beloved mentor, an African-American member of the Harvard glitterati,, a proponent of the idea that “Whites” should be eliminated as a social class.

I am not sure what the late Derrick Bell meant by suggesting that Whites be eliminated as a social class. However the New Black Panther party urges African Americans to create a Red Sea of White Blood. They are urged to “get armed up…suit up and boot up for war” the reason being that “true revolution needs blood shed…”

Frankly, all this seems so harsh to me. Nevertheless it strikes a harmonious chord with Bell’s racialist vision of an America without Whites. Needless to say neither Bell nor the New Black Panther party inspired the slightest criticism among a mainstream journalist elite that twice daily burn incense to our current president. Truly, when events lay bare their moral bankruptcy they run silent and run deep.

In fact, the Obama Administration, approves the late Derrick’ Bell’s racialist theories. Accordingly, they are now taught in schools throughout the land. Soon therefore, the elimination of Whites as a social class will enter an American ethos which celebrates constitutional government, the rule of law, the freedom and dignity of all people whatever their race, religion or national original. But now however there will be exceptions.

A radical organization known as the Pacific Educational Group (PEG) is actively promoting Derrick Bell’s Critical Race Theory in public elementary and high schools nationwide, with an intense focus on what PEG calls “Systemic Racism.” With the approval of the Obama administration, and under the guise of closing achievement gaps between black and white students, PEG is promoting teaching methods that discourage “black and brown” students from conforming to an inherently“ white” -- and therefore racist -- curriculum.[1]

To be White therefore, according to the president’s once mentor Derrick Bell is to be racist. “This criticism

mirrored a Marxist attack long voiced in academia: that the Constitution had been a capitalist document incapable of allowing for the redistributionist change necessary to create a more equal world. To create a more equal world, the Constitution and the legal system would have to be endlessly criticized – hence critical theory – and torn down from within….The Marxist criticism of the system was called critical theory; the racial criticism of the system was therefore called Critical Race Theory.[2]

Now our foremost scholar, has displayed to all the world a stunning ignorance of constitutional principles. He betrayed this ignorance in an unprecedented criticism of Supreme Court Justices who dared to question the constitutionality of that Slough of Despond also known as Obama Care. So primeval is the president’s ignorance of constitutional law that the finest spin masters, those who hold truth in contempt, conscience an impediment, and the plain meaning of words a rhetorical obstacle, cannot spin away the president’s ignorance any more than they are able to spin pure gold from flax.

Democrats and other denizens of the left are still convinced, in spite of the president’s demonstrable falsehoods, fraudulent crony economic investments, and the “unprecedented” accumulation of unspeakable deficits, that in a messianic moment he will command the oceans to recede, the incendiary global heat to relent its drowning of the ever lovable polar bear—and most important preserve the invention of their federal jobs. “Ultimately,” the president held forth,

I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. Emphasis added.

The president, again spinning falsehoods, asserts that a strong majority passed Obama care into law. “In the House, the final vote was 219 to 212, with all Republicans and even 34 Democrats voting in opposition.” (Washington Post).In fact, the president prevailed by a sleight of hand suspiciously akin to bribery and by a device “Reconciliation” of questionable legitimacy. To their credit not a single Republican voted for the health care bill, and few if any of the Democrats who voted for bill bothered to read it. Some of those who did vote for Obamacare have long since resigned their office rather than face a 2010 Republican opponent—or as they asserted in their farewell address, “to spend more time with their families.”

It is a draconian feature of legal ethics that an attorney interested in the outcome of pending litigation presently being tried before a judge may not seek to influence the judge’s deliberations or decision by arguing his point of view to the public or by attempting subtly to intimidate, influence or in any respect show his contempt for the court or its presiding judge. He may not infer publically that the judge or judges—in this instance Supreme Court Justices—may rule contrary to the law or in a manner prejudicial to the Constitution. A lawyer engaging in such conduct subjects himself to a citation for contempt of court, a fine, lengthy imprisonment and disbarment. The president I suppose considers himself above such plebian punishments.

President Obama in demonstrating his contempt for the judicial process characterized the Supreme Court Justices as an “unelected group of people” thereby implying that because they are unelected they might very well break their oath and by a ruling adverse to the president betray the Constitution. Why else would he have emphasized that the Justices are unelected other than to infer that they may demonstrate their contempt for the People’s Constitution without fear of repercussion

The president’s characterization of the Supreme Court Justices, well, only the conservative Justices likely to vote against his health care plan is overripe with hyprocracy. We may recall that the president himself actually ordered the Holder Justice Department to cease the Justice Department’sdefense of the Defense of Marriage Act a law actually passed by a bi-partisan Congress and signed by a former president. Acting in his capacity as a one man Supreme Court President Obama declared, without stating seriously the rationale for his decision, that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

But why do I characterize as shocking the president’s ignorance of the first and most fundamental power of Supreme Court jurisprudence—judicial review? It is because President Obama’s legal theory forms no part whatever of constitutional jurisprudence. It is nowhere approved or mentioned in a single state, federal or Supreme Court case. It is not once mentioned in the Federalist Papers, a publication explaining the Founders’ rationale for the drafting of a new constitution.

James Madison did not once mention the theory in notes taken at the Philadelphia Convention. It is not taught at any law school in the United States. It forms no part whatever of American or British jurisprudence. In fact, it is an invention, an odious legal fiction, and an assault on the Supreme Court’s powers of judicial view established by Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. The president’s theory cutting to the quick is a lie.

Where to begin? Well first, the Supreme Court has been nullifying Congressional legislation deemed unconstitutional for more than 200 years. It is, therefore, boldly fallacious to suggest that “unelected Supreme Court Justices” may now be embarked upon an “unprecedented” usurpation of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, the highest authority on constitutional issues, is vested with the power and obligation to determine the constitutionality of legislation challenged by the people. There is no exception whatever to this rule despite the president’s outrage that a law he has worked into being is under scrutiny.

The Declaration of Independence expresses the first principles of natural law. “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The principle is ancient: in Caesar’s Rome Jus Gentium, the peoples’ law—for men under the scepter of nature are all equal—[3] and in Great Britain a Common Law derived from the ancient customs, traditions and legal precedents of an English-speaking people.

In the Magna Carta Libertatum, The Great Charter of Liberty, the British nobility created the first enduring draft of the American Constitution. One cannot read the now ancient British Magna Carta without recalling the meter and power, the plain and enduring grace of the American Constitution’s written word.

It is a truth splendid and enduring that the Constitution belongs to a sovereign people. The Constitution does not belong to the office of President, to the Senate, House of Representatives or Supreme Court; and it is the right of a sovereign people to challenge and condemn its abuse by legislation repugnant to its plain words. Should the Supreme Court declare Obama Care in violation of the Constitution the Supreme Court Justices will have preserved the integrity of America’s highest court, the sovereignty of an American people and their Constitution—this to the unalterable shame of their presiding president.